9 On myth as ideology

Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth

Bruce Lincoln begins his provocative and wide-ranging 1999 Theorizing Myth (hereafter TM) by tracing the surprisingly varied connotations that the terms mythos and logos have had. The conventional view is that the history of at least Western thought has been an advance from mythos to logos. Mythos is commonly associated with the emotional, the irrational, the primitive, the religious. Logos is commonly associated with the logical, the rational, the modern, the scientific. Plato’s identification of mythos with poets, who for him are the unthinking mouthpieces of gods, and of logos with philosophers, who for him are the deepest of thinkers, is taken as epitomizing the ancient Greek view.

Lincoln shows that before Plato, the evaluation of mythos and logos was often the reverse. Homer and Hesiod do not merely exemplify mythos, as convention assumes, but outright espouse it, and espouse it over logos, which they characterize in the same wary, skeptical, disdainful way that Plato later characterizes mythos:

In the Homeric poems (hymns as well as epics), the term logos covers much the same semantic range that it does in Hesiod, although with a few different nuances and shades of meaning. Most striking, Homer’s logoi are always set in opposition to some situation or threat of violent struggle. In all instances the term denotes acts of speech—often soothing, sometimes deceitful—that persuade men either to abandon the battlefield and renounce physical force or to find comfort and solace in moments of peace. The voices of official and conventional morality, however, tend to depict those who use and those who are influenced by such speech as irresponsible, womanly, or childish in nature.

(TM, p. 8)

The criticism of logos is that it can be used for bad ends as well as good ones, that it is used by the weak against the strong, and that it works by emotional manipulation rather than by force of argument.

Homer and Hesiod, no less than Plato, pit mythos against logos, but they characterize mythos in the same way that Plato characterizes logos:

In Homer, mythos often denotes what it normally does in Hesiod: a blunt and aggressive act of candor, uttered by powerful males in the heat of battle or agonistic assembly… . The situation, then, is very much like that we have encountered in Hesiod: mythos is an assertive discourse of power and authority that represents itself as something to be believed and obeyed. Nowhere in the epic does it mean “false story,” “symbolic story,” “sacred story,” or anything of the sort.

(TM, pp. 17–18)

The praise of mythos is that it is used for good ends, that it is used by the strong and noble, and that it works by the cogency of its content. In short, Homer and Hesiod characterize and evaluate mythos and logos in the opposite way that Plato does, even though by the same criteria. Plato may connect logos to philosophers rather than to warriors, but he still sees logos as direct, frontal argumentation—the way that, according to Lincoln, Homer and Hesiod see mythos.

Lincoln traces a spectrum of ancient Greek views on the subject. Heraclitus, who comes close to Plato, nevertheless stops short of Plato in barely mentioning mythos and in acknowledging that even logos “can persuade through unscrupulous means: seduction, deception, flattery, guile, and many more. In this aspect, logos is particularly associated with women, tricksters, and figures of limited physical or political strength who manage to overcome stronger adversaries by their shrewd speech” (TM, p. 27).

Xenophanes allows for good, socially useful myths as well as for bad, anti-social ones and indeed reserves the term “mythos,” for which he retains “high respect,” for stories that “are moral in their content, reverent in their attitude, and socially beneficial in their consequences” (TM, p. 29). Xenophanes employs another term altogether for would-be bad myths.

Most Presocratics discuss only logos, not mythos. Other Presocratics celebrate mythos, using it “to invest particularly important and/or difficult portions of their writings with transcendent authority” (TM, p. 30). Conversely, the Sophists, rather than pitting mythos against logos, deem poetry, the expression of mythos, as, in the case of Gorgias, “nothing more than ‘logos with meter’.” Gorgias “develops the view that logos can persuade by manipulating opinion, playing on the emotions, arousing delight, and in many other ways that have nothing to do with communicating the truth” (TM, p. 33). For the Sophists, logos and mythos together are equivalent to, for Plato, mythos in contrast to logos. Yet for Gorgias, mythos, however manipulative, still serves a socially useful end. He is therefore less extreme than are later Sophists, for whom the end is simply power. Here mythos is an amoral tool. It is propaganda.

Plato sets poetry against philosophy and thereby sets mythos, which poets use, against logos, which philosophers use. Existing myths undermine society by describing the gods as immoral. Myths appeal to emotions. Poetry is “a form of logos that is enhanced by melody, rhythm, and meter: features that add nothing to make it truer, clearer, more readily verifiable, or more analytically rigorous” (TM, p. 38). Poets may be inspired, but they merely transmit what is revealed to them. They do not understand it. And what they transmit is largely false because it is immoral. Still, Plato, for all his disdain for philosophers “who stoop to traffic in mythoi” (TM, p. 39), is prepared to use and even to concoct myths that serve the ends of the state—“recognizing that poets and the myths they tell can be of great value provided they remain firmly subordinated to the philosopher-kings” (TM, p. 40). Myths are useful for conveying truths that cannot be established with certainty by philosophy—for example, truths about the afterlife—and for conveying philosophical truths to those incapable of doing philosophy. In short, “mythoi serve as prime instruments of indoctrination, which the state … uses for its own purposes” (TM, p. 41). The state concocts myths to persuade its subjects to obey its laws. Put another way, myth is ideology.

As striking as Lincoln’s argument is, there is something inconsistent about it. On the one hand he asserts that Plato’s cynical view of myth is by no means the only possible one, in ancient Greece or elsewhere. On the other hand he asserts that myth is ideology—or, as he puts it, myth is “ideology in narrative form.”

The view that myth is ideology is not new. The locus classicus among theorists of myth is Bronislaw Malinowski (1954 [1926]), whose own view of myth is anything but cynical. Malinowski never quite makes clear whether for him moderns as well as “primitives” have myth. But wherever it is to be found, myth functions to secure obedience by rooting laws, customs, and institutions in the primordial past. Myth confers on social obligation the authority of tradition: do this because it has long been done. Myth declares not that whatever is is right but that whatever is is venerable. Trobriand political and social divisions are justified by a myth that says that these divisions already existed when humans lived underground and were simply perpetuated when humans emerged from the ground:

The world, say the natives, was originally peopled from underground. Humanity had there led an existence similar in all respects to the present life on earth. Underground, men were organized in villages, clans, districts; they had distinctions of rank, they knew privileges and had claims, they owned property, and were versed in magic lore. Endowed with all this, they emerged… . They brought with them all their culture to continue it upon this earth.

(Malinowski 1954 [1926], p. 111)

To take a modern example, one commonly offered justification for retaining the British monarchy in the face of republican misgivings is exactly its longevity. To tamper with it would be to tamper with tradition. Myth for Malinowski serves to encourage citizens or subjects to accept an imposition that they would otherwise likely resist. But Malinowski does not thereby read myth cynically, the way that Lincoln does. Perhaps it is because he, unlike Plato, does not consider the origin of myth. As a functionalist, he starts with the existence of myth and seeks to determine its effect. He does not ask whether it was concocted to serve that function, though the function he finds would make myth an amazingly fortuitous device for social control if it had been created for some other reason.

At the same time Malinowski, for all his preoccupation with the social function of myth, presents myths that have nothing to do with society. Myths about natural phenomena like illness, aging, and natural catastrophes serve not to nudge denizens to submit to what they might otherwise fend off but, on the contrary, to reconcile themselves to what is beyond their science and their magic to control (see Malinowski 1954, pp. 126–138 [section 3]). The beneficiary of these myths is not society but the individual. The payoff is more existential than social. Where is ideology to be found here?

There is an alternative, unmentioned by Lincoln, to the view that logos rejects mythos. It is the view that mythos leads to logos. Here logos builds on mythos. Both this view and the view that logos rejects mythos are evolutionary, as Lincoln stresses of the latter position, but evolution can cut two ways. Taken one way, evolution stresses the advance of the present over the past. The emphasis is what the present breaks with. Taken another way, evolution stresses the dependence of the present on the past. The emphasis is what the present builds on. The view that logos builds on mythos is to be found in the work of various theorists, notably the sociologist Emile Durkheim; the classical philosopher F. M. Cornford, himself influenced by Durkheim; and the philosopher Karl Popper. For all three, mythos paves the way for philosophy and for science by providing a cosmogony. Philosophy transforms that cosmogony from a personalistic one, in which events in the world stem from the behavior of gods, into an impersonal one, in which events stem from mechanical processes. Science also provides ways of testing the cosmogony. Yet as much of an advance over mythos as logos is, logos is beholden to mythos, without which it would never have arisen.

Where Durkheim concentrates on religion, Popper focuses equally on myth. Science for Popper does not, to be sure, emerge out of the acceptance of myth, but it does emerge out of the criticism of myth:

Thus, science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them.

(Popper 1974, p. 50)

Popper goes even further. He maintains that there are scientific myths as well as religious ones. The difference between scientific myths and religious ones is not merely in the content but even more in the attitude toward them. Where religious myths are accepted dogmatically, scientific myths are questioned:

My thesis is that what we call “science” is differentiated from the older myths not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second-order tradition—that of critically discussing the myth. Before, there was only the first-order tradition. A definite story was handed on. Now there was still, of course, a story to be handed on, but with it went something like a silent accompanying text of a second-order character: “I hand it on to you, but tell me what you think of it. Think it over. Perhaps you can give us a different story.” … We shall understand that, in a certain sense, science is myth-making just as religion is.

(Popper 1974, p. 127)

That a hard-nosed philosopher of science like Popper is prepared to root science in myth rather than in the rejection of myth offers a strongly alternative slant to the relationship between mythos and logos.

In his early book From Religion to Philosophy (1912) Cornford, like Popper, argues that Greek science grew out of myth and religion, but he limits himself to the content and considers not at all the attitude. For Cornford, science perpetuates, albeit in secular form, religious and mythical beliefs. Greek science only subsequently severed its ties to religion to become empirical science. But in his posthumously published Principium Sapientiae (1952) he argues. much more boldly, that Greek science never severed its ties to religion and never became empirical science. Here logos does not merely begin with mythos but also ends with it. Mythos and logos prove forever intertwined. In short, the same array of positions on mythos and logos that Lincoln shows existed among ancients also exists among moderns.

In a few paragraphs Lincoln leaps from fifth-century Greece to the end of the eighteenth century, when, so he argues, myth was again seen positively. But where in ancient times myth was touted as the ideological weapon of one group within a society against another, now myth was touted as the ideological weapon of one nationality or one race against another. The myth of a nation or a race articulated the distinctive virtues of that nation or race. To imbibe the group’s mythology was to be inculcated in the spirit of the group. Lincoln is not maintaining that this chauvinistic use of myth was widespread. He argues that it was used by the West—by individual Western nations against rivals and by the West as a whole against peoples elsewhere. Myth was a key tool of nationalists, imperialists, and colonialists.

While the majority of nationalistic theorists of myth were German—Hamann, Herder, the Grimms, Wagner, Nietzsche, Adalbert Kuhn, and Friedrich Max Müller—equally influential were the Frenchman Paul Henri Mallet and the Englishmen James Macpherson and, even more, Sir William Jones, whom Lincoln almost singles out for his racism.

The figures that introduced the modern study of myth were not, like their predecessors, philologists but social scientists: anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. Lincoln gives least attention to psychologists, never mentioning Freud and mentioning Jung only in passing. The modern theorists were primarily British (English and Scottish) and French rather than German. They studied myth in its living, social context rather than as a text in a library, and they often tied myth to ritual. Of E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, J. G. Frazer, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Arnold van Gennep, Lincoln writes that they “worked out a radically different model of myth from that of the comparative mythologists [i.e., philologists]. Having come to see myths as primarily an oral, and only secondarily a textual, phenomenon, they studied them in connection with ritual performances and patterns of social organization rather than with language and poetics” (TM, p. 70).

Yet these newer theorists, no less than their predecessors, used myth for nationalistic and racist ends:

In broader fashion, these scholars also transferred a Darwinian model of evolution from the biological to the cultural sphere, orienting their professional mission toward the category of “the primitive.” This key term marked not just temporal but also spatial, racial, and political difference and was applied to all those peoples to whom the European metropole would deny coeval status. Theorizing myths as the stories of primitive peoples, the pioneer anthropologists went on to constitute certain aspects of myth (e.g., the roles played by gods and animals, episodes of incest and cannibalism, instances of non-Aristotelian causality) as irrationalities that revealed the childhood of human thought. This perspective reflected, and also helped legitimate, the late nineteenth-century burst of colonial expansion by replacing earlier missionizing thematizations of the colonized as pagans in need of salvation with a similar, but updated, narrative in which indigenes lacked, not the Christian gospel, but reason and/or history: they were people mired in myth… . For all its differences, the victorious anthropological model shared salient features with its philological antecedent. The latter differentiated Aryan and Semitic Völker on the basis of language, the former differentiated primitive and modern cultures on the basis of evolution, but both discourses constructed a sharp discontinuity between two sorts of people: one associated with a European “us” and the other with a lesser, alien “them.” In both instances, the presence or absence of myth was a crucial variable, although it was differently valued in the two cases.

(TM, p. 70)

As helpful as Lincoln’s differentiation of the social scientists from the philologists is, the distinctions are in fact less clear-cut. For example, the Grimms pioneered the oral study of myth. Conversely, Tylor, while having done some fieldwork in Mexico, came to epitomize the study of myth as a text independent of its living, social context. The same is true of Frazer, who nevertheless did tinker with the possibility on going on a famous anthropological expedition to New Guinea. By no means do most of the anthropologists and sociologists named tie myth to ritual. Smith, the pioneering myth ritualist, does so above all, but Tylor almost ignores ritual. Durkheim gives far less attention to myth than to ritual, and Frazer wavers.

Most important, by no means do all of the philologists or social scientists named make the association of myth with the irrational, the inferior, the other, or even the primitive. The theorist who most deems myth irrational goes unmentioned: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He sees myth as the manifestation of a distinctively primitive mentality. “Primitive” peoples think differently from moderns. Impervious to logic, they even violate the law of noncontradiction. Their thinking is enveloped in emotion-laden concepts, or “collective representations.” “Primitives” do not merely conceive of the world differently from moderns but also, shaped by their representations, perceive it differently. They assume and therefore see mystical identity between themselves and the world. Myth is part of religion, religion is primitive, and moderns have science rather than religion. Myth is false as well as not logical. Science is not only logical but also true. “Primitives” use myth not to explain the world but to commune with it, or “participate in” it.

And yet even Lévy-Bruhl’s position—his original, not just his subsequently modified, position—is not one-sided. The primitive mentality is less inferior to the modern than different from it. Hence he calls it “prelogical” rather than illogical: “it is not antilogical; it is not alogical either. By designating it ‘prelogical’ I merely wish to state that it does not bind itself down, as our thought does, to avoiding contradiction” (Lévy-Bruhl 1926 [1966], p. 63). Modern thinking is scarcely free of a primitive mentality. Only scientific theorizing is:

Finally, let us consider the most favourable case, that of peoples among whom logical thought still continues its progress, whose concepts remain plastic and capable of modification under the influence of experience. Even in such circumstances logical thought will not entirely supersede prelogical mentality… . It is far from being all the concepts in current use, for instance, which express the objective features and relations of entities and of phenomena solely. Such a characteristic is true of a very small number only, and these are made use of in scientific theorizing.

(Lévy-Bruhl 1926 [1966], pp. 342–343)

It is Durkheim who first faults Lévy-Bruhl for deeming primitive thinking other than logical. For Durkheim, primitive thinking is far from a distinct mentality and in fact creates the logic that science inherits. Without primitive thought there would be no modern thought. Primitive thought is expressed in religion. Modern thought is expressed in science. Without the religious explanation of the world there would be no scientific explanation. And while the religious explanation of events is rejected by science, the categories it creates are retained:

For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy… . Men owe to it not only a good part of the substance of their knowledge, but also the form in which this knowledge has been elaborated. At the root of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding… . Now when primitive religious beliefs are systematically analysed, the principal categories are naturally found. They are born in religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought.

(Durkheim 1915 [1965], pp. 21–22)

Contrary to Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim deems primitive thinking the source of not only modern categories of thinking but also the modern quest for explanations of the world, which means the quest for connections among seemingly disparate phenomena:

So it is far from true [as Lévy-Bruhl claims] that this [primitive] mentality has no connection with ours. Our logic was born of this logic. The explanations of contemporary science are surer of being objective because they are more methodical and because they rest on more carefully controlled observations, but they do not differ in nature from those which satisfy primitive thought. To-day, as formerly, to explain is to show how one thing participates in one or several others. It has been said [by Lévy-Bruhl] that the participations of this sort implied by the mythologies violate the principle of contradiction and that they are by that opposed to those implied by scientific explanations. Is not the statement that a man is a kangaroo or the sun a bird, equal to identifying the two with each other? But our manner of thought is not different when we say of heat that it is a movement, or of light that it is a vibration of the ether, etc.

(Durkheim 1915 [1965], pp. 270–271)

At the same time religion itself for Durkheim is eternal rather than merely primitive. Whenever a group amasses, religion arises. The real difference between “primitives” and moderns lies in their form of social organization. Religion is really the experience of the group, and only afterwards is that experience intellectualized. Myth is part of religion, though Durkheim gives far less attention to myth than to ritual in either primitive or modern religion.

For Tylor, who gives far more attention to myth than to ritual, myth is consummately rational—as rational as science. Both arise and function to explain systematically all events in the physical world. The mythic explanation is false and the scientific one true, but false does not mean irrational. Tylor, like others of his time, does parallel “primitive” peoples to children and moderns to adults. But he sees children as miniature adults. Myth arises to satisfy an innate need to explain events in the world—a need no less intense in “primitives” than in moderns: “Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as it is and no other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its lowest stages” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, pp. 368–369).

Not to emotion but “to the human intellect” “may be assigned the origin and first development of myth” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 284). “Primitive” peoples are hardly an irrational, alien other. To twist a famous line used of Jews, “primitives” are for Tylor like moderns, only less so. The similarities, not the differences, between “primitives” and moderns, and in turn between myth and science, are what mesmerize him. So respectful is he of myth as scientific-like that he castigates those theorists who are prepared to sacrifice the seriousness of myth by reading it allegorically or symbolically—this to make it acceptable to moderns. For Tylor, myths “rest upon a broad philosophy of nature, early and crude indeed, but thoughtful, consistent, and quite really and seriously meant” (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 285). Undeniably, myth for Tylor is wholly primitive, is incompatible with science, and must be spurned by moderns, but because it is so much like science.

To be sure, Tylor does not go so far as Durkheim and link the emergence of science to myth. In fact, Tylor never explains why science ever arises, and he never explains why myth, which is capable of explaining all events in the world, ever fails.

Moreover, there is nothing nationalistic about Tylor’s approach. After all, he titles his tome Primitive Culture. The foil to primitive is modern, not English or German. The same is true of Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and most of the other theorists named.

Frazer fits Lincoln’s description of the social scientific theorists more snugly than Tylor or Durkheim, given Frazer’s indisputable disdain for “primitive” peoples and for myth. While he fluctuates, in especially the second edition of The Golden Bough, he does tie myth to ritual, with myth providing the script. In one of his scenarios the ritual is the imitation by the king of the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation. By the first law of magic, as typified by voodoo, to imitate an action is to cause it to happen “in the real world.” This law rests on the failure of “primitives” to distinguish between a symbol and the symbolized. The imitation is taken as identical with what is imitated. If it were recognized as mere imitation, it would have no efficacy. Myth tied to ritual in this way stems from logical myopia on the part of “primitives.” Even so, the religious explanation of the world given by myth—that events in the physical world stem from either a decision by a god or the physical state of a god—is not irrational. As for Tylor, it is simply false. The enlistment of myth to change the world—to get the crops to grow—is not irrational either. The failure to distinguish the symbol from the symbolized is a failing not of myth but of magic.

In Frazer’s alternative scenario the ritual is not the imitation of the death and rebirth of anyone but the actual killing of the king, in whom the god of vegetation is believed to reside, and replacement by another, to whom the god is transferred. There is no failure to make any distinctions here. The action is not imitative because the king is killed directly and not through magic. The place of myth here is limited. The ritual does not enact the myth of death and rebirth of the god of vegetation but simply transfers the still living, simply weakened god from the body of the incumbent king to the body of his successor.

Frazer’s contempt for “primitives” is over their repeated inability to recognize that neither version of the ritual works. Where Tylor faces the problem of accounting for why myth ever gives way to science, so successful is myth as explanation, Frazer faces the problem of accounting for why, by either scenario, myth lasts as long as it does, so hopeless is it at agriculture.

Yet for all of Frazer’s disdain for “primitives” and for myth, both are still like moderns and science. Myth satisfies an innate need in all humans to control the world in order to survive. Where myth fails, science works, but both are devised for the same end.

Moreover, Frazer’s real target is Christianity, which he seeks to parallel to primitive religion. For him, Christianity is no more than another vegetation cult, just the most successful of the lot. Christianity takes over from Judaism the primitive practice of putting a human being to death not for the ethereal purpose of atoning for sin but for the mundane purpose of getting food on the table. Jesus is no more than a primitive god of vegetation. The annual spring celebration of Jesus’s death and resurrection was a ritual intended to revive the crops, with Jesus the King of the Jews. Trying to account for the “remarkably rapid diffusion of Christianity in Asia Minor,” Frazer argues that “the new faith had elements in it which appealed powerfully to the Asiatic mind”: belief in a dying and rising god of vegetation and, more, an annual spring ritual of regicide. Here Frazer mixes his one scenario—the imitation of the death and rebirth of the god—with the other—the actual killing of the king and replacement by a successor:

All over Western Asia from time immemorial the mournful death and happy resurrection of a divine being appear to have been annually celebrated with alternative rites of bitter lamentation and exultant joy; and through the veil which mythic fancy has woven round this tragic figure we can still detect the features of those great yearly changes in earth and sky which, under all distinctions of race and religion, must always touch the human heart with alternative emotions of gladness and regret, because they exhibit on the vastest scale open to our observation the mysterious struggle between life and death. But man has not always been willing to watch passively this momentous conflict; he has felt that he has too great a stake in its issue to stand by with folded hands while it is being fought out… . Nowhere do these efforts, vain and pitiful yet pathetic, appear to have been made more persistently and systematically than in Western Asia. In name they varied from place to place, but in substance they were all alike. A man, whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god, gave his life for the life of the world; after infusing from his own body a fresh current of vital energy into the stagnant veins of nature, he was cut off from among the living before his failing strength should initiate a universal decay, and his place was taken by another who played, like all his predecessors, the ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection and death. Such a drama, if our interpretation of it is right, was the original story of Esther and Mordecai or, to give them their older names, of Ishtar and Marduk… . A chain of causes … determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had made in high places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to put out of the way.

(Frazer 1900, vol. 3, pp. 196–197)

Strictly, Frazer reduces Jesus not to a vegetation god or even to a king but to the temporary substitute for the king, who himself is thereby spared. True, Frazer praises Jesus as a moral teacher, but it is as a scapegoat that for Frazer he gets used by Christians. By no coincidence the case of Jesus, in the third edition of The Golden Bough, falls in the volume titled “The Scapegoat.” (Frazer takes the section on Jesus from the second edition of The Golden Bough and puts it as an appendix to vol. 9 of the third.) Not Jesus’s teachings but his death supposedly explains the appeal of Christianity. Frazer is thus writing to expose modern, not primitive, religion. For him, as for Tylor, primitive religion, including myth, is incompatible with science, but he lumps primitive religion with modern religion and pits both against science. If religion is for him alien, then moderns, not only “primitives,” still partake of it.

It was Smith who first connected myth to ritual. For him, myth arose to account for any ritual that was still practiced but no longer understood. But in contrast to Frazer, who develops Smith’s pioneering linkage of myth to ritual, Smith sharply distinguishes primitive religion from modern, which is both nonmythic and nonritualistic. Smith does not, then, associate myth or ritual with religion per se. Where Frazer groups all religions together and sets them against science, Smith differentiates one stage of religion from another and tries to reconcile modern religion with science. At the same time he downplays the place of myth in even primitive religion, which consists primarily of ritual:

strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers. The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper; but he was often offered a choice of several accounts of the same thing, and provided that he fulfilled the ritual with accuracy, no one cared what he believed about its origin.

(Smith 1889, p. 19)

Consequently, Smith spurns the attention conventionally accorded to not only creed but also myth in ancient religion: “mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths” (Smith 1889, p. 19). Smith is, then, hardly targeting myth, which for him arises late on the religious scene and, at least initially, serves only to make sense of long-standing ritual.

Of the theorists whom Lincoln mentions, the one most disdainful of myth is Andrew Lang—better, Lang from The Making of Religion (1898) on, when he breaks with Tylor on animism and espouses primitive monotheism or monolatry. Lang’s contempt for myth is like Müller’s. Ironically, when Lang breaks with Tylor on religion, he sides with Müller, with whom he had previously feuded bitterly. Both Müller and later Lang draw a rigid disjunction and indeed opposition between religion and myth. What is most primitive is religion, which they applaud as sublime and ethereal. There is no mythology here because there is only one god, a nonanthropomorphic god. What Lang and Müller despise is myth, which is irrational, superstitious, and degenerate. While Lang retains Tylor’s explanation of myth, his opinion of it after 1898 is the opposite of Tylor’s. Myth arises to explain events in the physical world, but the explanations that it gives are ridiculously irrational rather than, as for Tylor, scrupulously rational. Where for Tylor myth is part of religion, for Lang it falls outside religion: “religion is one thing, myth quite another thing” (Lang 1901, vol. 1, p. 160).

But insofar as myth for Lang comes after original, pristine religion, he cannot be equating myth with “primitives.” More precisely, he does maintain that “primitives,” even the earliest ones, have both religion and myth: “even some of the most backward savages make a perhaps half-conscious distinction between their mythology and their religion” (Lang 1901, vol. 1, p. 5). Moreover, religion—nonmythological religion—still antedates myth. Even advanced religions invariably develop mythology: “Indeed, even civilized races cannot keep on the level of these religious conceptions, and not to keep on that level is—mythology” (Lang 1901, vol. 1, p. xxi). “[N]ow from pure inability to live on the level of his highest thought, man mythologizes and anthropomorphises, in Greece or Israel, as in Australia” (Lang 1901, vol. 1, p. xxi). “[W]e are at least certain that the Christian conception of God, [originally] given pure, was presently entangled, by the popular fancy of Europe, in new Märchen about the Deity, the Madonna, her son, and the Apostles… . Here, beyond possibility of denial, pure belief came first, fanciful legend was attached thereafter” (Lang 1901, vol. 1, pp. xvi–xvii).

The divide for Lang, then, is not between “primitives” and moderns but between religion and mythology. On the one hand “primitives” have religion as well as mythology. On the other hand moderns have mythology as well as religion.

Müller, for his part, narrows the divide between primitive and modern by maintaining that all human beings are religious; by deeming religiosity, following Friedrich Schleiermacher, a distinct mental faculty; by crediting earliest humanity with a full experience of god, or “the Infinite,” through its manifestation in the sun and other celestial phenomena; by seeing mythology as a fall from pristine religiosity; and by attributing mythology less to any intellectual weakness of its concoctors than to the confusing absence of the neuter gender from their languages.

Lincoln may well grant these points yet still maintain that Müller does pit the mythologically and thereby polytheistically inclined Aryans against the ritually and thereby monotheistically inclined Semites. But even monotheism is not free of mythology, insofar as God is still characterized anthropomorphically. The Bible, especially in the earlier books of the Hebrew Bible, depicts God as having a body, eating, sleeping, feeling human emotions, and being visible. God is far more than a metaphor for the impersonal Infinite, which is what “God” is in pristine religion. Conversely, Müller credits the later mythology of individual nations worldwide with coming to recognize the originally metaphorical language of their own myths. It is not merely nations from the Semitic tradition but also the national literatures of India and Persia that, in the early National Period following the Mythological Age, cease to take their myths literally, while still cherishing them (see Müller 1869, p. 12). For Müller, the Mythological Age was an aberration, but one to which Semites as well as Aryans succumbed.

There are other viewpoints not considered by Lincoln. For example, Georges Sorel (1950 [1961]) vaunts myth as ideology—but as a revolutionary, not a reactionary, ideology. Ernst Cassirer (1946), once he turns from primitive myth to modern myth, writes to combat myth and the ideology that It foments, not to endorse either.

Lincoln devotes rich chapters to the political use of myth by Jones, Nietzsche, and Dumézil. I am in no position to challenge Lincoln’s tough, relentless dissection. I challenge only his view that modern theorists, philologists, and social scientists all share a single view of myth and that myth for all of them functions as ideology.

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